From the Diary of Vlad Tepes III, Rightful Voivode of Wallachia: I write this from my home in Pécs, as my few remains loyal soldiers mass to face the latest invasion of Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. My children, I do not think my chances of victory are great, but it is my fervent wish that even if I go to join your mother in death, I can blunt the Ottoman spear enough that you can regain Wallachia in your own time.
As usual, my luck is fucking me up the ass by surprise in the middle of the night. And after a childhood as a hostage in the Ottoman court, I know EXACTLY what that feels like! My halfwit brother Radu, on the other hand, grew to LIKE such attention...which explains why he is trying to depose me at the behest of his vile Ottoman masters. I’d call him the ill-gotten spawn of a dog and a rat, but I don’t want to insult my dead lovely mother, nor my strong father’s memory. Still, it is hard to believe such a traitorous cur could be derived from the same blood as I.
I have not told you much of what happened in that hell pit of a court, but this could be my last chance to do so. You need to understand WHY I know them to be the most vile spawn of devils, so that you can avoid their sweetened lies, and understand the true and total betrayal my brother is committing against our family. I still remember the time I spent there to this day, even though a lesser man would want nothing but to forget it…
In the Year of the Lords 1442 Radu and I travelled to Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire, as father sought to secure a treaty which would prevent the constant attacks by his Ingram forces into our home of Wallachia, at the behest of out Voivode at the time, John Hunyadi. Our eldest brother Vladislav left behind to rule Wallachia in the extended absence of our father, that such a trip required. Despite his promises of safe passage and guest’s rights, the three of us were imprisoned and our escorts killed, until father’s release later that year. Radu and I were not so lucky, Mehmed II kept us in his court to insure our father’s loyalty, and his continued payment to the court for our safety. To think my father the mighty warrior, the Dragon of Wallachia famed in courts and songs, would be reduced to the state of a beggar for his sons’ safety.
Safety that never materialized. Father wasn’t gone one day before I woke up hearing Radu screaming in his room across the hall from mine, as my face was being pushed into the bed’s cushions and my nightgown pulled up behind me. I was trying to learn the language of the court at the time, but my attacker used words that I had not figured out yet. Words so vile that I could comprehend their intent, if not their meaning.
When he was done, and turning to the door as my backside felt like it was bleeding fire, I snatched the ornate stick that I was to use to clean my oil lamp, and lunged at his back. As he spun around trying to throw me from his shoulders, one hand slowly peeling away my fury-strong limb as I tried to choke him, I used my other to stab out his eye.
With a bellow of pain and rage of his own, I was jerked from his back and thrown into a wall, my head smacking the stone with a
I was barely 13 winters old. I should have been learning the sword from my father, not trapped and at the mercy of an abominable foreign court.
***
When next I woke it was to a face full of dirt and the greasy feel of sweat on my naked skin. Coughing out a lungfull of the animal-tasting filth, I roll over, with the greatest headache I’ve had since the last midwinter feast. It quickly becomes clear that my luck is as bad as it always is, since I seem to be in a dirty pit with a large gate on the other side, out which I can hear growling and scraping.
“He’s awake,” a voice above me says, and I look up to see a rough-looking thin half-orc black man in a slave’s welded collar, just before he steps back out of sight. Well, my luck could be WORSE, I guess, I think as I feel for my own throat, sighing my relief at its bare skin.
I’m distracting myself from my hunger and raging thirst by examining the pit’s wall, round stones in fire-solid clay, and so unclimbable. Yet I am trying to find a way out, a flaw or protruding section that would permit handholds, when I hear footsteps above me. Looking up I see a few well-dressed Ingram priests and the vizier of the court, his eye covered in still-seeping cloth bandages. Ah, so THAT is the man I must kill.
“Enjoying your work, boy?,” he shouts down at me from an entire man’s height above, secure in his safety so far out of my reach. “It has been two days in the pit for you, waiting for you to wake to get my vengeance! I hear you infidels like dogs, well let us see how much dogs will like YOU!”
Turning to a man I cannot see, as the priests laugh, he shouts, “We only need ONE hostage to secure your father’s loyalties, and your sweet brother is MUCH more biddable than YOU. Slave, release the wolves!”
The gate across from me creaks as the rope behind the wall pulls it up into the wall, releasing three wolves into the torch light from above, their tender eyes adjusting from their dark dungeon as they whimper in both pain and hunger. Poor furballs, we treat even our war dogs better than these curs treat such majestic foes!
As they adjust to the light I hunch over and walk towards the wolves, clicking my tongue, my friends, I am of the pack, can you still smell our own dogs on me from where our hound master was teaching me to them? One of the wolves extends his snout to me, sniffing the air, as I reach out and stroke the top of his muzzle, then scratching is bottom. His fellows taking his friendly whining as a signal that I was a friend, one nuzzling my thighs and the other climbing below my other arm for me to pet his back.
“WHAT IN THE HELLS IS THIS?!,” I hear the vizier scream in rage above me, before there is a grunt and scream of pain. “You useless CUR, you swore to me these wolves are man-eaters!”
I look up to see the vizier, his hand squeezing the slave’s arm, as my own sneaks out to the gate where they cannot see. The slave pleads in a desperate tone, “My lord, they are! They ate another prisoner just nine days ago!”
Standing and watching the vizier I see that his blind eye is towards me, as his other hand clutches the slave’s chin and brings him to his spit-flying face, while I stand up, “So why is that…that…THING still AL-”
He never finishes the word as with a
With a muffled wail of agony he flings the slave towards the pit to shield himself from further attack, while collapsing backwards away from sight, the priests rushing over to aid him. The slave, along with two of the vizier’s teeth I later find, falls into the pit and a
Good, let them fear me. I will insure that, as much as they fear me, it will NEVER be enough!
***
With the aid of the slave’s meatless thigh bones, cracked open to points by my new wolf friends, I climb out of the pit after waking back up once more. The remains of the slave’s rags around my waist, to protect the shreds of my remaining modesty, with a special present tied into them. I saw on waking that the torches had burned out, but my eyes could see with the faintest light coming from somewhere else, letting me find my new tools and other things.
Now that I am out of the pit the light is stronger, and I can see that it is coming from the door less entryway into this…execution chamber. Stalking towards the light lets me see that it is coming from a high window in a hallway, one with several other doors that are still there, including one at the end that I can hear faint noises coming from and see the flickering of light under.
It is easy to sneak to that door and listen in on what is on the other side, by pressing my ear to the bottom. I hear somebody muttering under their breath, their accent thick with a language I am unfamiliar with, even though I can tell that they are still attempting to speak in the local language I have only become passable in these past months. Even better, I hear the sound of a knife scraping across wood, slurping, and muffled chewing, He has FOOD!
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With a new fire in me I lift the base of the door with one of the busted bones, levering it UP on its hinges so it doesn’t squeal as I open it to slip inside. This is a guard room, and I see only ONE guard.
Once he is dead with a thigh-bone in his neck, I let the corpse collapse from the back of the stool and take his place. He was only eating fat-baked bread and some boiled carrots, but after days without food it tastes better than the most succulent deer my father’s cooks ever made...maybe it is he pepper? And the barrel of shaded water in the corner of the room slakes the fire in my throat that had been growing for days, the waterskin I find beside it only adding my my good fortune.
Of course the guard’s armor is too large for me to wear, but his under shirt makes a decent tunic with the sword belt cinched as tight as it would go around my waist. While the curve-hooked sword that hangs in it is not something I feel confident to wield with its strange balance and heft, the dagger he was using to cut the hard-baked bread into mouth-size pieces is another matter. I leave the sword behind, and take only the dagger in its sheath with me as I enter the Sultan’s palace proper.
I’m coming brother, I will get you out of here, just wait while I clear us a path.
***
I was in the dungeons of the place, which thankfully is not some place that is kept clean since the important people rarely come here. The few people I see are mostly just human, half-elf, and half-orc slaves – all of whom ignore me as soon as they see that I am not wearing a collar and walking the place armed and with confidence. They must think me a guest of the sultan…HA! Guess father was right: if you act LIKE you belong in court, then you will be TREATED as if you belong.
Not wanting to give away my real status as a prisoner, I avoid speaking with the slaves, and avoid even more the exits I see that have guards posted at them. As the place quiets for the night, I finally find an unguarded door that opens up into the royal section of the palace. The section where I was being held with my brother and, more importantly, where the vizier’s quarters must be located.
Looking around as I wander from shadow to shadow, hiding in the shades cast by potted plants and statues cast by the wan moonlight that enters from the tall wind-blowing windows of the connecting hallways, eventually I find one I recognize. Openning the door on one side of the hall I can see my little brother asleep in his bed, before shutting the door once again, Let him rest, he deserves it, and will need all his energy for when I return.
It is only the next hallway that I find the vizier’s door, recognizable by the guard leaning in the corner, his head nodding back and forth as he tries to keep himself awake in the pale moonlight from the window across from him. I manage to sneak up to the statue a couple paces away from him, moving only when I see his head falling down, and stopping with its panicked jerks upright.
Once in place I wait until he is nodding again before throwing the metal hook hangar of the sword off my belt at the sill of the window, making a
I wait at the door for a few breaths, my ear to it, but all I hear is the faint steady breathing of a man asleep inside, I hope it is that cyclops bastard son of pigs, and that I didn’t just kill some stranger’s guard. Openning the door just enough to slip my thin frame inside, I can see in the pale moonlight coming in through the silk-covered windows of the room, that my guess was right…I am in the room with the first man I have ever HUNGERED to kill in my young life.
Soft-padding across the carpets on the floor to his bedside, I almost back out as I break into a fearful sweat, and my ass twitches and clenches in my growing terror, NO! Only a COWARD lets their enemy live because they fear pain, and the Son of the Dragon KNOWS NO FEAR. With prideful determination I untie my gift from the rags I still wear under my tunic, take the dagger firmly in my good hand, and walk up to his bedside.
With a knee on the bed as I lean over him, keeping me steady, I place the dagger just above his throat and my open palm in front of his remaining eye. A quick spit into his face and he splutters awake before falling still quickly at the cold sting of the dagger’s edge drawing a thin line of blood from his throat, “Wha-, huh, who”
“SHUT UP YOU WALKING GOLEM OF BIRD DROPPINGS!,” my rage lets itself out in my voice, as I see him waking fully and staring up into my face, recognition sparking horror at the realization of his position.
I shake my open hand in front of his face to attract his attention to it, before tipping it over and dumping its contents onto his face, “You left your teeth behind, so I thought I would return them.”
As he clinches his eye shut to keep a tooth out of it, I lean INTO the dagger as I pull it ACROSS his throat, spraying his life’s fluid all over me, some of it even falling into my savagely-grinning mouth before I spit out the metal-tasting fluid. Huh, the fear is gone. All I feel now is eager satisfaction…and maybe a bit of relief? Now I understand why father always talks about revenge being the best medicine a heart can have.
But since I still had things to do that night, and limited time to do them, I peeled off the tunic and used the bedsheets to wipe the blade clean along with my face. Finding one of his own shirts thrown over the seat of a sitting couch, and cinching the fine silk in place of my former rough cloth, I quickly make my way back to Radu’s room. Since his door and the hallway remained clear, I was able to slip inside and start shaking his shoulder, his small body practically lost in the immense bed, “Radu brother, wake up, it is time we left this place.”
Groggily he wakes up and stares at me in sleepy recognition, puzzlement evident in his eyes, “Vlad? Are you a ghost? You must be, they told me you were killed by dogs.”
“
Radu climbs from the bed and puts on the only clothes he has, some tight-fitting silken outfit with slippers, while I use a blanket to wrap up all the valuables I can find in the room which look like they would not break, We will need coin to get back to Wallachia, and I find another dagger beneath his pillow. Vlad II, the Dragon of Wallachia, it seems even your youngest son has your fire in his blood!
As I am holding my brother’s dagger and grinning with sibling pride, I hear him open the door, “Vlad, let us leav-
With shock I quickly turn to the door, only to see it open further as the Sultan stands there, behind a guard that is holding my little brighter to his waist with a sword at his throat, “It seems that you not only escaped the wolf pit, but ALSO killed my vizier and his guard…all in one night, little infidel.”
“No sultan,” I say while dropping into a crouch and taking a step towards him, “your count is off, I ALSO killed the guard in your dungeons.”
With a grunt from the sultan, Radu is jerked up onto his toes to escape the rising blade, “That is far enough, unless you want your brother to be the pig at tomorrow’s feast. It seems I must separate you two even further than this, if I am to keep you as hostages. Release your weapon and submit to my guards, they will keep watch over you this night while I decide where to send you. Unless, of course, you want your father to lose his two youngest, here and now.”
As he talks more guards enter the room, surrounding me with sticks in hand instead of blades. Staring at my brother’s eyes, and seeing his pleas in them, I sigh and thrust the dagger into the bedpost beside me, “Very well, I surrend-”
A sharp pain in the back of my head precedes my second trip into the dark.
***
I wake up with a severely-beaten body in the back of a shaking wooden box, and the feel of several cracked bones, like that time two years ago when a branch knocked me from my horse. Since I can hear the sound of horses and rolling wheels, I could realize I was in a wagon on my way somewhere. Even with the agony from my beating being increased by my body shaking in its shackles, I could tell from being able to breathe deeply and my limbs moving as far as the chains allowed, that I had no BROKEN bones. Thank all the gods in the darkness and silence, they seem to still want to be entertained by my misery, instead of my death. My luck strikes home, once again.
It is days later, being fed rough-baked bread and foul water, while having to sleep inside the box in my own filth, that we reach our destination. I later found out it was the fortress of Eğrigöz, called Emit by the slave-soldiers that were trained there, and I was to join their number. After the first trainer’s death when he thought my small stature meant I was weak enough to be used, I was beaten once more…but not killed as I had expected. I had already seen several trainees killed for MUCH less, and realized that they must have received orders to keep me alive from the Mehmed II. Even better, they took no blades to my flesh, so I knew I wasn’t even to be maimed.
My next trainer was the largest half-orc trainer in the fortress, and he had similar ideas. But he was clever enough to ambush me in the section of the stream that had been diverted through the fortress so we could bathe, likely to avoid my having a dagger at hand to stab in his ear like the last trainer.
But even the mighty thews of a half-orc need air to keep their strength. Air that is hard to get when your legs are locked in my own, and your face is pressed into the bottom of the stream.
When they drug me out of the bathhouse to be beat again, I had managed to snatch my former trainer’s training ring and place it on my own hand. Thanks to its pain-giving enchantment, and a lack of fear of the feel of others’ manhoods, I was able to kill TWO of the enforcers before they beat me to blackness once again.
After that, the commander of the fortress seems to have decided on a different path towards training me, seeking to entreat my cooperation with fine foods and trainers who decided to vent their foul Ingram lusts on others instead of myself. Thus it was that I returned to the sultan’s court with my training unit for his inspection over a year later, only to be pulled out of the ranks and told that my father had paid our ransom. But that we were not to be returned to him, since I was now part of the sultan’s army, and Radu had become his court’s favorite perfumed toy.
I knew what he was doing, he was using this news to see if I had been broken at Emit like he wanted. He doesn’t KNOW about the commander’s change of heart!, I suddenly realized. But father raised me to RULE, and to do that, one must be CLEVER. So I bowed with a, “Yes sultan, to hear is to obey,” and stayed there for untold breaths before he sighed and dismissed me back to the ranks.
It was a year later that news reached me at Emit about my father and elder brother’s death in a futile attempt to rescue his sons, alongside he army of the new governor of Hungary, John Hunyadi. Which is humorous, since I was mere days away from executing my OWN escape plan, but had to head back with the squad of loyal soldiers to the sultan’s court. Once again, some god somewhere is having a deep belly-laugh at MY expense…I swear it.
Thanks to a honeyed tongue I had practiced with the fortress’ staff, and a few of the local girls, I was able to convince the sultan to send me to Wallachia at the head of the very slave-soldiers I had been training with…and PAY me to “create a foothold in the area.”
Of course, after deposing the traitorous Hunyadi, the obvious planner of my family’s downfall for only a moon-struck simpleton would not see the common thread in his rise and our descent, I slayed the traitor and sent word of my reaching the throne back to Mehmed II. All I needed was for him to send me Radu, to “secure the line in the eyes of the people” as he had promised, and I would be have FINALLY succeeded at getting us back home.
But of course the traitorous fat bag of rats refused to do so. To say I was “upset” at his latest betrayal would be to call a forest fire a candle, and I’m afraid I took my anger out on the messengers he sent back. At least they got to return to him…with only one eye between them, as a reminder of what I could do.
And so my entire lifetime’s experience with the Ottomans began, and continued. It became obvious that there are only TWO things the Ingram peoples could be relied on for: betrayal, and atrocity.